Refugee crisis: EU ministers to discuss binding quotas - as it happened ... (Hoping for a good outcome).

• Central European states resisting refugee quotas
• Ban Ki-moon urges European leaders to show compassion
• Hungarian army given power to block migrants

Summary

We are going to pause the blog for now, so here’s a summary of the latest key developments:

• Croatian police blocked off part of the country’s border with Serbia, leaving more than 2,000 refugees straned in no man’s land between the Croatian village of Tovarnik and the Serbian town of Šid. The development marks the first time Croatia has attempted to stop refugees from entering its territory since it became the primary refugee route to northern Europe last week.
• Europe’s interior ministers are meeting in Brussels for what are expected to be difficult talks on the imposition of refugee quotas.Germany’s Interior minister Thomas de Maizière said: “This will be a hard meeting. I’m not sure that we will have a result ... it is unacceptable if Europe sends a message to the world that today there is no possible solution.”
• A war of words between central Europe’s leaders worsened after Croatia announced that 35,000 people crossed its border a week after Hungary closed its frontier with Serbia. Hungary said its relations with Croatia were at “freezing point”, as it continued to accept migrants bused back to Hungary’s border by Croatia.
• Serbia’s prime minister, Aleksandar Vucic, demanded EU action against Croatia if it its border restrictions continue. He said: “Croatia cannot be taking it out on Serbia and humiliating it, and destroying Serbia’s economy without consequences.”
• The German rail operator Deutsche Bahan suspended key services to and from Austria and Hungary until 4 October. German Chancellor Angela Merkel repeated her opposition to building Hungary’s policy of building more fences.
• United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed alarm about the increased use of detention and criminalisation of irregular migrants and asylum seekers. Ban appealed to all European leaders to show leadership and compassion.

Updated at 3.12pm BST

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2h ago14:47

Once again Britain has said it won’t take part in any EU-wide resettlement programme for refugees.

But that didn’t stop Home Secretary Theresa May hectoring her European colleagues on how to treat “illegal economic migrants.”

Arriving at the meeting of EU interior ministers, she said: “We need to get on with the job of the wider measures that need to be taken of ensuring that we are breaking the link for economic migrants of making this dangerous journey and settling in Europe. So we need to return those people who are illegal economic migrants and who have no right to be here and we need to ensure that people arriving at Europe’s borders are being properly dealt with, properly fingerprinted, so that decisions can be made, and where there are economic migrants they can be returned.”

Source : http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/sep/22/refugee-crisis-eu-ministers-to-discuss-binding-quotas-live-updates